Reimaging Resource Constraints and Affordances: Smallholder, Environment and State Dynamics in Wello, Ethiopia

• Author / Creator

  Debalke, Mulugeta G.

• In this dissertation, I explore and analyze smallholders’ perceptual and cultural understandings of environmental opportunities and constraints regarding land, soil, rain and trees in mixed-crop-livestock agriculture among rural communities of Wärräbabbo in Wello, northeast Ethiopia. Also, I identify, examine and analyze their responses mainly to drought, de-vegetation, soil erosion, land scarcity and food shortage. Based on a processual ecological anthropology, I argue that their understandings and responses are informed not only by their culture and their immediate environment but also by the external environment existing beyond their direct knowledge and experience. Thus, inasmuch as they do not live in isolation from regional, national and international contexts, I argue that conditions largely beyond local influences and experiences like land tenure and relief aid need to be considered. Based on these findings, I discuss the ongoing shift from a traditional “ecocentric” to an anthropocentric valuation of the environment and its resources and constraints, including changes in the notion of resources from given to investible entities. In this regard, I demonstrate that small farmers’ perceptions, adaptive thoughts and cultural behaviors, including traditional ecological knowledge, though still distinct in many ways, yet are partly and slowly changing and converging with that of the state-model. Nonetheless, I stress that such a convergence does not necessarily result in better or ecologically superior resource management practices. In all cases, my work verifies the theory that, in the long run, consciousness and knowledge alone are not sufficient to diagnose and respond to environmental constraints and opportunities unless what is considered ‘normal’ is kept on a constant doubt. Combining history not only with ethnography but also some aspects of linkage to higher level organizations, I discuss how environmental resources and constraints are not just empirical experiences but also matters of social construction. I underline that the need to be ecological in the human-environment relation has to be an intrinsic value of our environmental ethics or our sense of being human rather than a mere time-framed project. Over the years, the communities I studied have been combining survival and sustainability, potentially affecting existing approaches of understanding environmental affordances and constraints.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Environmental history
  • Sociocultural chnage
  • Agriculture
  • Relief aid
  • Wello
  • Livestock rearing
  • Agricultural extension
  • Food insecurity
  • International cooperation
  • Environmental interaction
  • Land degradation
  • Deforestation
  • Migration
  • Indigenous knowledge
  • Soil erosion
  • Land tenure
  • Drought
  • Coping strategies
  • Land conservation
  • Crop production
  • Werebabbo
  • Ethiopia

• Graduation date

  Fall 2012

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Doctor of Philosophy

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R3R135

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.